Missouri governor is calling for criminal charges against a journalist who found social security num

Missouri governor is calling for criminal charges against a journalist who found social security numbers exposed on a public website (msn.com)

A few days ago there was a video posted on this site about the scary future of the internet (Something about this: Wayforward Machine • Visit the future of the internet (archive.org)).

How's this for a step toward restricting the web? It's getting to the point where viewing the source code of websites that aren't yours is a crime! (I'm assuming you can still view the code on your own website.)

Actually, I sort of agree with the Missouri governor. Although web browsers make it easy to see the source code of a website and inspect its elements, no one said that the experience of a web page includes viewing its code as a right. I think the term "hacker" might be accurate regarding this reporter's looking through the code of a government website and finding exposed social security numbers.

 

Why would real SS numbers be in the source code?

 

I don't know, but it's my guess that they were passing data from the back end (in PHP, etcetera) onto the front end as Javascript variables. The client side has to get its data from the back end into Javascript somehow.

Javascript on the front end has to interact with the user. And it has to get data into it somehow.

Back end, server scripting languages such as PHP can pass the data, but it isn't live in the browser like Javascript is.

 

A few years ago, I discovered California had birth certificates online and there it was--my mother's maiden name... "We're from the government and here to help..." Egads.